Bill Frenzel, Key Voice on Economics in House, Dies at 86

Representative Bill Frenzel of Minnesota in 1985.CreditCreditGeorge Tames/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Bill Frenzel, a longtime Republican member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota who was a leading voice, respected by both parties, on trade, tax and budget policy while never serving in the majority, died on Monday at his home in McLean, Va. He was 86.

The Brookings Institution, where he has been a guest scholar since retiring from Congress in 1991, said the cause was cancer.

Mr. Frenzel had remained active in public policy debates until this year. Besides his Brookings work, he had been appointed to governmental panels by presidents of both parties since ending his 20-year career in Congress. In September, President Obama reappointed him to the White House Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations, to which Mr. Frenzel was first named by President George W. Bush in 2002; he was chairman from 2002 to 2011.

In the House, Mr. Frenzel rose to become the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee and a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee and its trade subcommittee. For 15 years he was a congressional representative to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in Geneva.

Through the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Mr. Frenzel was a spokesman and negotiator for congressional Republicans on fiscal and trade policy, including a landmark overhaul of trade laws and the bipartisan 1990 deficit-reduction agreement.

Mr. Frenzel had not been out of the House long when President Bill Clinton enlisted him in 1993 as a special adviser to help win congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement. That agreement, a pact with Mexico and Canada, needed Republican support in light of the opposition of many Democrats and their union allies. This year Mexico awarded Mr. Frenzel the Order of the Aztec Eagle, its highest honor for foreigners.

Mr. Frenzel’s career in Congress covered half of the 40 consecutive years in which Democrats controlled the House after the Korean War. Yet as bitterly partisan as debates could get, the two parties remained civil and regularly came together on significant policies, enabling Mr. Frenzel to wield influence even in the minority.

“It’s hard to think of anybody that is a better example of why Congress used to work than Bill Frenzel,” Vin Weber, another former Republican congressman from Minnesota, said in an interview on Monday. “He was at once a master of policy, mainly trade and tax policy; a devoted partisan — he worked hard for Republicans to win all his life, first in the Minnesota Legislature and then the Congress — and completely respected by those on the other side of the aisle. It’s a combination you just don’t find anymore.”

Mr. Weber and Mr. Frenzel had a friendship that illustrated a paradox of Mr. Frenzel’s career: In the Minnesota Legislature and in Congress, he was a moderate, compromise-oriented, establishment Republican, but in the 1980s he nonetheless supported the more militantly conservative Republicans like Mr. Weber.

In 1989, Mr. Frenzel nominated and helped elect Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the leader of party insurgents, to be a House Republican leader. Five years later, after Mr. Frenzel had retired, Republicans won a House majority and Mr. Gingrich became speaker.

Representative Sander M. Levin of Michigan, a Democrat who served with Mr. Frenzel on the Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement that by his humor and willingness to seek common ground, Mr. Frenzel “has always been a superb example of a time when the institution worked more effectively.”

William Eldridge Frenzel was born on July 31, 1928, in St. Paul. He attended St. Paul Academy. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Dartmouth, then served as an officer in the Naval Reserve during the Korean War. He became president of his family’s warehouse company and, from 1962 through 1970, served four terms in the Minnesota House. There, he was a member of a party faction widely known as the Hennepin County Mafia, which pressed for a more moderate party image.

Mr. Frenzel won the first of his 10 terms in the House in 1970. In 1978, he declined party overtures to run for governor or senator; Republicans won both offices that year.

Survivors include his wife of 63 years, Ruthy; their daughters, Debby Frenzel, Pam Lindon and Mitty Frenzel; and two grandchildren.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Bill Frenzel, 86, Key Voice on Economics in House. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe